I'm thinking that you developer types might have someone who is into perl.

What is the degree of difficulty in "learning" perl? I am 65 yr. old, and back a generation and a half I programmed in machine language, Basic, and COBOL did not seem strange.... plus the usual office stuff like DBII, etc.

I absolutely HATE "C", and also most of it's children. I think that its type and field checking just begs to be broken. I was, and still am, surprised that "C" is the father of linux. and it's ugly.

Should I bother? What are the strengths? I was prompted to wonder after apt-get got perl-Test-Harness. An interesting name, about which I found no documentation

I second Jeff's opinion here. I've programmed in both Perl and Python for at least 7 years now. I learned Perl first (and it's fairly easy to pick up), but Python is much better. The syntax is cleaner - it almost reads like English. When it comes down to it though, either will do whatever job you need it to do. They're both very robust and very well supported. And each has huge communities for support and help. I only ever use Perl anymore for work (supporting some old software I wrote a long time ago. And every day, I'm tempted to rewrite it in Python. :)

jebba wrote:

Well, people will talk about what is best like crazy, but if you're jumping into it, I'd suggest python over perl.

Um, I've played with a few languages and I'll say the following;
- The best language is the one that you "like", "get on with" or understand
- The more on line docs there are the quicker you'll learn
- Ruby 0wns
- Bash shell has lots of docs. have a look in /usr/share/doc/bash-3.2/ [ note that your version may be different]
- perl's cool too. Looooooads of docs on your machine right now.
- python's cool. May want to get a book or collect some bookmarks.

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